There is some bizarre notion among some drivers that not wearing your seat-belt is a safer way to drive. The idea among these people is that if you don’t wear your seat-belt, there’s a chance you might magically be ejected from scene of an accident and crash into the pavement somewhere outside the car. This is idiotic.

4. In an Accident, You Become a Projectile

When a car is traveling down the interstate at 60 mph everything in the car is moving with it at that speed- you, your backpack, the stuffed animals on the back window, etc. When your car comes to a sudden stop, such as in a forward collision, only things attached to the car will decelerate with it. Everything else, including your favorite stuffed animal, becomes a projectile flying through your car at 60mph.

When you’re wearing your seat-belt, you decelerate with the car and the car’s air bags help stop you from smashing into the steering wheel. If you aren’t wearing your seat-belt however, you’ll be thrown throughout the car, potentially hitting other occupants as 150lb speeding projectile. This is bad news for everyone in the car as a collision with you at high speeds is going to leave quite a mark.

3. Modern Safety Features Assume You’re Wearing Your Seat-belt

Modern cars are designed with numerous modern safety features, such as crumple zones and airbags, designed to help you survive a collision. Just take a look at this crash test video between a 1959 Chevy Bel Air and a 2009 Chevy Malibu. All of these safety features however are designed with the assumption that you’ll be sitting where you belong in the event of an accident. This isn’t the case if you’re thrown around throughout the car because you don’t have your seat-belt on.

A crash test between a 1959 Chevy Bel Air and a 2009 Chevy Malibu illustrating advancements in auto safety technology.

2. You’re Unlikely to Survive Ejection

Many people claim that if you don’t wear your seat-belt, you’ll be ejected to safety and suffer few injuries. Unfortunately for them, that’s not the quite the case as the risk of fatality of an ejected occupant is three times greater than the risk of ejection of a non ejected occupant.

Even if you are one of the 3 in 10 people who are ejected without a seat-belt, it’s likely you won’t survive to be part of someone’s anecdotes explaining why they don’t wear their seat-belt.

1. Most Accident Fatalities Come from Not Wearing Your Seat-Belt

Probably the most convincing evidence for wearing your seat belt is simply that you are less likely to survive a fatal car crash if you’re not wearing your seat-belt. I used data from the National Highway Traffic Administration’s Fatal Accident Reporting System and compared the data on restraint use. I chose to focus on passenger vehicles only because most of this post has been about passenger vehicle safety features.

Share of people killed each year.

Over the course of 2013, 21,132 people were killed in fatal accidents involving a passenger vehicle. Although roughly the same percentage of people died with and without their seat-belt on, the survival percentage of those wearing seat-belts is considerably higher than those without. Simply look at the following graphs:

A side-by-side comparison of the survival rates of people with and without restraints.

As you can see, those involved in fatal accidents with their seat-belts were twice as likely to survive than those who did not. Two-thirds of people without a seat-belt in a fatal accident were killed versus only one-quarter of those with their seat-belts on.

To me, this evidence is damning. It shows that you have a considerably higher chance of surviving a deadly accident with a seat-belt on, which is enough of a reason for me to wear my seat-belt. Remember, drive safe and don’t put others at risk- wear your seat-belt.

I switched over from Revenue hits to AdSense. I hope the experience is a little more pleasant. I’ve come across a bug where when I open certain pages, a pop-under appears. I’m not sure what’s causing it. I’ll try to find out. Thanks for reading this quick update!

UPDATE: Earlier some ad code that I was testing got stuck in the minify cache. I have since fixed the popunders.

Personally, I’m not a fan of advertisements, but they’re a crucial piece of what makes the World Wide Web work. They provide advertising revenue to the millions of content creators across the web, allowing them to continue doing what they do best while keeping the Web free and open for everyone.

I am certainly not the most diehard content creator ever. I’ve written various miscellaneous things across the web and I post here, on my blog, occasionally. I haven’t earned anything from keeping my blog online. In fact, it has cost me quite a bit of money. That’s why I’ve finally decided to place ads on my website.

Currently I chose to only ad a small button in the sidebar and a slider on the side of the screen, click them if you want- I get money. I may expand in the future. I hope those reading my website don’t find them too distracting or invasive. If you have your own website and you’d like to do similar ads on your website, I use RevenueHits.

Tell me what you think in the comments bellow or tweet me at @RobRoseKnows.

It would be nice if a hosting service straight up offered a free student VPN; unfortunately that’s not the case but I did discover another way to get a free VPN as a student. (If you don’t know what a VPN is, check out this link) Many companies offer promotions for students and this method combines a few of those offers to get a free VPN. I’ve detailed the necessary steps bellow.

1. Sign up for DigitalOcean

In order to make this work, you’re going to need a DigitalOcean account which you can create here. DigitalOcean is an IaaS provider that provides affordable SSD-powered cloud servers, so it’s a good thing to have an account for regardless. In order to sign up, you’ll need a credit card but don’t worry- you won’t be charged (this is, after all, a method to get a free student vpn) if you follow the next step which is…

2. Sign up for the GitHub student pack

You’ll need to sign up for the GitHub student pack to actually get a VPN as a student for free. You can do that by following this link here. GitHub will need you to enter and verify a .edu email address to request an account. It’ll take some time for the account to become available but you’ll receive an email when it’s ready. It’ll take some time for GitHub to approve your student pack but when they do you’ll need to enter the special code you can find on the pack’s website in DigitalOcean. Alternatively, you can use the free $10 credit DigitalOcean gives you for signing up with this link to test a VPN out right away.

3. Set up

Once you get the $100 credit in your DigitalOcean account you’ll need to set up a Debian server and run the following command in SSH:

You can find all about setting up a Digital Ocean Droplet here. You can find out about how to use your new-fangled free student VPN here. I hope you can use this to get a free VPN as a student, good luck and enjoy your free student vpn!

America’s northern neighbor might seem peaceful and friendly but secretly Canadians are stealing US tax dollars, and it all happens in a town named Escourt, Quebec. Escourt is a town populated by 3,000 Canadians and 4 Americans. This is a result of strangely drawn borders that leave a small sliver of the town inside the US state Maine.

The only point of interest in this small sliver is a gas station named Gaz Bar US and the sliver is named, appropriately, Escourt Station, Maine. However, despite the small size and tiny population, Escourt Station still manages to draw many Canadian visitors every month.

Here’s some uncommon knowledge: apparently yesterday (June 14th) was Flag Day. If you didn’t remember don’t worry neither did I, at least not until I noticed the cheap plastic flag planted at the end of my driveway. You see, every year a local realtor plants flags at the end of the driveways of everyone in the local neighborhood. This is of course accompanied by a pamphlet hung on the door handle explaining how much he wants you to GTFO so he can sell your house. He says it politely of course. Now I have no way of knowing for sure, but I can venture to guess that my local realtor isn’t the only business owner to use Flag Day as a way to sell you something.

This holiday marketing technique certainly happens on Memorial Day, so I wouldn’t expect Flag Day to be any different. That being said, I’ve never seen any passive aggressive Facebook posts about Flag Day sales. So why does it feel different?

I noticed I got a big spike in traffic today which can only mean one thing: one of my Cracked articles went live. Since that is the case (the borders article I cowrote was posted) I’d like to welcome the hundreds of people who are bombarding my site with views to my meager blog. If you’ve spent more than a couple of seconds here, you’ve probably noticed that I don’t really update on the schedule I’d like to (that is, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday). Good news though! I finished writing a piece about flag day that I plan on posting tomorrow sometime around noon EST. Hopefully some of you will be around to read that.

In the meantime however, you can check out some of my older work. I’d consider my most thorough posts to be Backed by the Pentagon (all about the government in Hollywood), A Brief History of Gmail (all about how Gmail came to be) and There Be No Dragons Here (all about the trope of hic sunt dracones found in fiction). If you’d like, you can also try these games I play called Cyber Nations and Politics & War, which are too pretty good games that I enjoy. You could also start watching Stargate: SG-1 or Deep Space 9, which are two shows that I love. If you don’t have it already, you can use this handy dandy link to get 30 days of Amazon Prime free which has both SG-1 and DS9 available for streaming.

You can also look forward to another Cracked article I wrote coming in another couple of months about some video games. I’ll post a link to it on my Twitter when that happens. In the meantime, enjoy your day and remember that 70% of you have already stopped reading this.

First and foremost, I’ll admit that I am not a stock market expert and this post does not constitute investing advice but I’d like to explain why I’m investing in Valero Energy Corporation. Wednesday (May 13th) however I decided to liquidate my measly four shares in Tesla Motors (NASDAQ:TSLA) at the price of $243.69 and invest in 12 shares of Valero Energy Corporation (NYSE:VLO). I put all remaining cash into Schwab’s S&P 500 Index fund (MUTF:SWPPX). In doing so, I hope to have made a good mid-term value investment. I’ve detailed my reasons within this post.

Cyber Nations is a nation simulation game created by Kevin Marks or, as he’s known in-game, admin. The game was first released on January 6, 2006 and many of its users joined after being recruited from the older game Jennifer Government: NationState. At its height, the game had thousands of players; but Cyber Nations’ history is history you want to know about what Cyber Nations is today. I first signed up for Cyber Nations in 2012 because I liked the idea of an online nation simulator game and CN certainly meets that description. Over the past two plus years, I’ve had plenty of fun in Cyber Nations developing my nation and working with my alliance to defend friendly nations against attacks from enemy factions and from rogue nations. I have certainly had fun with Cyber Nations, but there have definitely been some down points as well. Let me explain it point by point. Read More

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a complete disregard for scientific research and tangible evidence. Due to the open nature of the Internet, the web is sure to be full of that kind of nonsense. The Food Babe is one such site that lies close to the core of the anti-science blogosphere. A parody blog I am particularly fond of, I Fucking Don’t Understand Science, took a shot at The Food Babe today that I found quite humorous. Have a look, and enjoy!

While browsing the internet today, I caught sight of this article on ZDNet about a computer algorithm now serving on the board of directors for the Hong Kong venture capital firm Deep Knowledge Ventures. The board plans to use the algorithm known as VITAL, short for “Validating Investment Tool for Advancing Life Sciences” to help with investment decisions. For further information, check out the article linked above.

This post is entirely off topic from what I’m supposed to be posting, but it’s an issue that has cost me a great deal of time and I hope I can save someone else that hassle. Referral spam is a very irritating tactic that internet marketers use to drive people to visit their site. Unlike other tactics which target users of a website, referral spam attempts to target the people running the website. I’m not extremely knowledgeable in the subject, but I know enough to give a brief over view of how it works, and where you can find resources to stop it.

Free email is a staple of our modern lives. We create Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo emails for the low low cost of zero dollars. But it wasn’t always like that. Believe it or not, people used to pay for email! That’s right dear readers, people once had to pay for email. Although it may seem barbaric, it was the reality many people were faced with when email was in its infancy. What might surprise you even more is that email predates the Internet and ARPANET!

The history of email is pretty complicated, but I hope to give you the basic rundown of the history of email and why free email is so important to us today. Happy April Fools day! Or more relevantly… Happy 11th anniversary of Gmail day!

Although the Pentagon might have considerably fewer sides than a star on the Walk of Fame, it still gets its own special place in Hollywood because of its participation in various large Hollywood blockbusters. Just like Coke or Pepsi, the Department of Defense loves to advertise. And what better way to do that than provide military resources to willing film makers?

Hic sunt dracones, translated as Here be dragons, is a line often found on maps throughout the world of fiction. The phrase can be found anywhere from video games to literature to tabletop games. And the idea behind the phrase is so commonly used it has its own TV Tropes page. The historical context for the word however is fairly limited.

The idea of a mysterious and forbidden land filled with dragons, beasts or other dangerous creatures comes from the simple fact that map making was once a very imprecise task, cartographers didn’t have anything close to the tools and resources we have today, or even those explorers such as Lewis and Clark would’ve had during their expedition across America. Due to the limitations of cartography, map makers would often draw images on their maps depicting various beasts, warning travelers about the dangerous of entering into unexplored territory. Writers and other creators often use the phrase Here be dragons or Hic sunt dracones (because Everything’s Better in Latin) to show that a map is old or that the task the characters face is a dangerous one.